European Poetry Festival 2023 : program announced

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2023
April 19th - May 11th
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2023

The EPF returns in spring 2023 for one of the grandest celebrations of European poetry ever to take place in the UK. Eleven events over three weeks will see over one hundred poets from across the continent and the UK come together for a celebration of liveness, collaboration and cross-linguistic collective inventiveness. All events are free to attend, and subject to change. 

• April Weds 19th : Versopolis Poetry Celebration at Iklectik Artlab, London

• April Sat 22nd : Norwegian Poetry in Collaboration at Iklectik Artlab, London

• April Mon 24th : European Camarade Norwich at National Centre for Writing, Dragon Hall

• April Weds 26th : Swiss Poetry in Collaboration at National Poetry Library, London

• April Thurs 27th : Austrian Poetry in Collaboration at Austrian Cultural Forum, London

• April Sat 29th : Catalan Poetry in Collaboration at Rich Mix, London

• May Weds 3rd : Danish Poetry in Collaboration at Hundred Years Gallery, London

• May Thurs 4th : Flemish Poetry in Collaboration at Kingston University, Kingston

• May Sat 6th : Dutch Poetry in Collaboration at Rich Mix, London

• May Weds 10th : Latvian Poetry in Collaboration at National Poetry Library, London

• May Thurs 11th : European Camarade Liverpool at venue to be announced March 23rd!

A note on : Finlay in Mayfair film in Living With Buildings Festival

Really pleased one of my short films, made with Vilde Bjerke Torset, entitled FINLAY IN MAYFAIR - one of the poets in London films I began during lockdown - will be screened at Coventry’s Living With Buildings festival run by Adam Steiner

LWB- IV - Live Film Screening - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
Find us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/events/1134689370589568
Living With Buildings is a festival of films that explore themes of people, poetry and place.
Past work has focussed on how we move through streets, the decline of social housing and the rise gentrification, roads to nowhere, and the space in between.
Find out more about the Disappear Here project - http://www.disappear-here.org/

A note on : EPF 2021, collaborating with Clea Chopard

An extraordinary poet and performer Clea Chopard is. I was lucky to work with her and I’m happy with how our collaboration turned out. Clea is brilliant with concepts and a really adapt improviser, so we worked up a couple of ideas and let it happen on the night, having met a few hours before for the first time. There was a levity in it, an ease, that is a credit to her skill and confidence. From translation to art poetry to talking performance to a kind of dance, and then being a poem burrito, human gift wrap, live walking poem board…

A note on : Swiss brilliance at the Rich Mix, European Poetry Festival winter 2021 opens

A really great night, a remarkable opening event to the winter 2021 European Poetry Festival in London, celebrating contemporary Swiss poetry with performance and collaboration. We had a pretty much full capacity audience witnessed the new works made for the night by eight pairs of poets. The audience were really generous and by the end everyone seemed proper happy. All the videos and photos are online here www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss

A note on : European Poetry Festival begins in 10 days, with Swiss then Norwegian poets!

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL : SWITZERLAND
November Saturday 20th at Rich Mix, London
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss

7pm doors / Free Entrance : EPF 2021 begins with an event centered around visiting contemporary Swiss poets presenting brand new performance collaborations with British-based counterparts, made for the night, at one of East London’s most iconic poetry venues. With Baptiste Gaillard & Vik Shirley / Rolf Hermann and Joe Dunthorne / Clea Chopard & SJ Fowler / Ghazal Mosadeq and Simona Nastac / Mikael Buck and Michael O’Mahony / Vanessa Onwuemezi and Martin Wakefield / Ana Seferovic and Konstantinos Papacharalampos & more. Supported by Pro Helvetia.

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL : NORWAY
November tuesday 23rd at Open Ealing, London
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/norway

7pm doors / Free Entrance : EPF 2021 continues with a celebration of contemporary Norwegian poetry, in collaboration. New performance poems made in tandem for this event will be presented across styles and languages. With Endre Ruset & Harry Man / Bjørn Vatne & Richard Marshall / Jon Ståle Ritland & JT Welsch / Maren Nygård & Susie Campbell / Silje Ree & Maria Celina Val / Tamar Yoseloff & Alison Gill / Chris Kerr & Virna Teixeira. Supported by The Norwegian Embassy UK and NORLA. The event will also serve as a launch for Utøya Thereafter : Poems in Memory of the 2011 Norway Attacks by Harry Man and Endre Ruset available from Hercules Editions

European Poetry festival - summer 2021, a mini documentary

Nice to have this small documentary as a kind of gentle summation of the EPF summer 2021 program, which presented a quartet of events in London, returning to live happenings across the city. From our showcase Camarade, with 20 UK-baed European poets presenting new works in pairs at St Johns on Bethnal Green, to an outdoor reading in Richmond Park and events held in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library, Peer Gallery and more. All events were free to attend and socially distanced.

The EPF will return in winter 2021, November 18th to December 3rd with events featuring international poets from across the continent, with events celebrating Austrian, Swiss, Spanish, Latvian, Hungarian, Swedish, Norwegian poets and more. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/

A note on : Limbo at Cannes Court Metrage, Manlleu Film Fest, Dokufest Kosovo

A few years back I co-wrote a short film called, LIMBO, originated and filmed by Lotje Sodderland. Thanks to Lotje and the films producers, it has been doing festival rounds recently, after being screened the London Short film fest it has upcoming screenings at Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage, Manlleu festival in Catalunia and Dokufest in Kosovo.

“LIMBO is a true-fiction short following the story of Witold, a young, Polish Londoner who takes a new job as a care worker. Under-trained and underpaid, he speeds from home to home on his bicycle, feeling the enormity of his responsibility as he enters hidden worlds to administer care to a delicate but dynamic assortment of elderly men living alone.” https://www.lotjesodderland.com/portfolio/l-i-m-b-o

Ken Loach said of it ‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’

EPF 2021 : Event #1 - Writers Kingston in Richmond Park

The European Poetry Festival 2021 opened with the last event of the Writers Kingston program for the academic year. I led around 50 people from the Richmond gate of the park into the long grass, where some were eaten by insects and others haayfevered, but most seemed happy. We then had over a dozen performances from a range of poets, many local to the Kingston area, many students and member of the popogrou collective.

Four publications were also launched this night, by Sylee Gore in absentia, Nina Fidry, Patrick Cosgrove and myself and Karenjit Sandhu.

Watching the sun go down over the park, it was an atmospheric start to the festival punctuated by a genuine feeling of camaraderie and some fantastic live works. All performances are video’s here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/writerskingston

A note on : Photo Poetry Surfaces and the Bristol Photo Festival

very cool to be a part of this project celebrating photo poetry, something ive been working away at the last half decade, teaching, sharing publishing https://www.photopoetrysurfaces.com/

my work with Norwegian poet Bard Torgersen - CROWFINGER - will be part of the exhibition online and I’ll be appearing at the online event on June 17th. www.bristolphotofestival.org/photopoetry

As part of the Bristol Photo Festival 2021, the Photo Poetry SURFACES (photo-visual-poetics) activities (curated by David Solo, Astra Papachristodoulou and Paul Hawkins) will be exploring and presenting a range of works. The programs will include mapping out the range of combinations (and sometimes going outside the lines), exhibiting a selection of current examples and presenting mixed media presentations of the work. We’re also hosting conversations about the nature of such collaborations, how such material may be “read” and looking at ways to assess or evaluate it.

A note on : Film with Thomas Duggan at Montreal and Venice

I had a glut of film work and collaborations in the latter half of 2020, due to obvious reasons. Trying to avoid the ubiquity and pseudo deadness of zoom teams skype, though it has its uses for chats, film is the best way to make work that can be shared at a remove. One of the films was made with my long-term collaborator Thomas Duggan, an artist, architect, designer based in Cornwall. He took a 16mm old camera up to the highlands and cut the footage into a poetic montage, this just at the time I was teaching tonnes of poetry film stuff, and so having pushed the more experimental potentials of the medium, I decided in this case, an separated exchange was the best route, where I write and record poetry to go with the images. When I teach I often mention this form as the standard for poetry films but its that for a reason.

The film is called HERE YOU WERE NEVER A CHILD. It has a soundtrack by The Dirty Three, which is remarkable, and a connection through Thomas. Happily, already, the film has been accepted for screening and competition at the Montreal Independent Film Festival and the Venice Short Film Festival.

A note on : Limbo screened at London Short Film Festival

This first screening of Limbo, Lotje Sodderland’s new short film which I co-wrote, was supposed to take place this January 2021 in the Curzon cinema, either in Soho or Mayfair. Unfortunately, not possible, and so the London Short Film Festival premiered it online, in a program of excellent shorts. Nice that the film has been aired once, and hopefully many more festivals to come.

EUROPOE : a new online course on European Poetry

An online course beginning January 23rd 2021, running for seven weeks. £200. 
All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses

The character of European literature remains a hotbed of innovation – a constant remaking of what we know poetry to be. This ambitious course seeks to introduce the English-language poet, or anyone captivated by a wide understanding of what poetry is, to the European tradition in all its richness.

Over the course of seven weeks, we will trace a line from the aftershocks of modernism, to the arrival symbolism, futurism, surrealism, and more. We explore the constraints that emancipate in the OULIPO movement, the collaborative asemic poetry of the CoBrA group, the onset of conceptual poetry, the birth of Concrete Poetry, the emergence of Sound poetry, leading to the current movement of Performance Literature. We explore electronic poetry and digital literature, and vitally, we present what is happening now – with contemporary poets working in the 21st century. 

We will also dip into the ‘grand’ post and pre-war literary poets across the continent, focusing in on their technique to inspire new works. From Mayakovsky to Akhmatova, Brodsky to Dragomoshchenko, Celan to Sachs, Brecht, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska to Różewicz, Ritsos to Elytis to Seferis, Popa to Jozsef, Salamun, Isou to Queneau, Cendrars, Pessoa. Ekelöf, Handke, Saariskoski.

Alongside the dozens and dozens of contemporary poets, EUROPOE will situate the anglophone poet with roads into an often occluded European tradition that will hopefully last long into the future... When the course finishes, an event and publication will consolidate that which everyone has produced. All info www.poembrut.com/courses

EPF Digital #8 - Messages from the Other Side

Thanks to everyone who has supported our digital festival over the last two weeks! To close European Poetry Festival 2020, we’re delighted to partner with the longstanding public video poetry project "Messages from the Other Side", founded and curated by Max Höfler. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/messages

Six poets from Graz and London each have written short poems for public screening in both cities. These video-poems or kinetic texts are styled as literary "news" for the other city, London to Graz, Graz to London. Projected onto the side of the Forum Stadtpark in Graz and Hardy Tree Gallery in London, passing civilians have witnessed the ludic newscasts of Natascha Gangl, Ghazal Mosadeq, Stefan Schmitzer, Vik Shirley, Thomas Antonic & Steven J. Fowler. The films have been screened publicly November 18th to December 11th 2020 and are available to view at the link above and vimeo.com/channels/nachrichtenvondrueben with German language versions.

The entire digital European Poetry Festival 2020 can be viewed www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 and we will return, in physical proximity, in 2021.

EPF Digital #7 - Three Norwegian Poets

Really some of favourite interviews I’ve conducted, with my friend and collaborator Bard, and the amazing Hilde, below, who will name two lambs after me. Worth a listen to all three pieces here, they are all very interesting, I think anyway.

EPF Digital 2020 presents two remarkable new long-form video-interviews with poets from Norway - Hilde Myklebust, discussing the darkness of nature from her remote farm and Bård Torgersen, chatting about transgression and ritual, amongst many other things! Plus a brand new video-poem commission by Norwegian writer Bjørn Vatne, a musical collaboration with artificial intelligence. More on their work can be found www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/norway

Supported by NORLA - Norwegian Literature Abroad and The Norwegian Embassy in the UK.

EPF Digital #6 - Three Lithuanian Poets

https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/lithuania EPF Digital 2020 presents presents new long-form video-interviews with poets from Lithuania, featuring Rimas Uzgiris, Dovilė Bagdonaitė and Aušra Kaziliūnaitė. View the full EPF 2020 online program here europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020

Supported by Lithuanian Cultural Institute and featured as part of the Maintenant series at 3am magazine.

THE HUNGARIAN VACUUM - a poetry film : EPF Digital #5

Four talking heads. Three Hungarians. One vacuum cleaner.

They are poets, they are miserable, and they are cut off from the world. United by sardonic pride, they come together to represent their country and wage war on the dust bunnies of the mind in this poetic deepdive. A daring poetry film, The Hungarian Vacuum is part gripping mystery, part arthouse project, part literary podcast, part poetry reading, and part utter failure. You will have questions, but you’re not likely to get any answers.

Supported by Hungarian Cultural Centre, London. A film by, and starring, Steven J Fowler, Kornelia Deres, Kinga Toth, Peter Zavada. Music by Benedict Taylor. Edited by Botond Bartha. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/hungaryfilm

A film as part of the European Poetry Festival Digital program. With no physical events in 2020, EPF digital reveals what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest.

THE SWEDISH BEEST - a poetry film : EPF Digital #4

From a lonely London a figure calls out for the lost poets and three Swedes will answer, each in their own way, with poetic precision and desolate northern sensibilities. The Swedish Beest is less than a cry for help and more than a poetry film; it is a documentary of those who are not there, a gathering of readings out of time and place.

Supported by supported by The Embassy of Sweden, London. A film by Steven J Fowler. Starring Aase Berg, Jonas Gren and Ida Börjel. Music by Benedict Taylor. Photography by David Spittle. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swedenfilm

A film as part of the European Poetry Festival Digital program. With no physical events in 2020, EPF digital reveals what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest.

EPF Digital #3 - Four Latvian Poets...

EPF Digital 2020 presents presents new long-form video-interviews with poets from Latvia, featuring Inga Pizāne, Krišjānis Zeļģis, Marija Luīze Meļķe and Lote Vilma Vītiņa. More on their work can be found www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/latvia

Supported by Platform Latvian Literature / EPF Digital is an eight part online festival, presenting long-form video interviews and entirely original poetry films. Unable, finally, to take place in the flesh this year, the festival will present poets from Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, Lithuania and more, leaning in to what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020

European Poetry Festival Digital begins - Three Swiss Poets

EPF Digital begins! After two cancellations, I’m happy that I bit the bullet and decided to lean into some proper online content. Masses to come, 9 interviews, 3 films, and more. This opening is just the beginning of stuff coming out over the next two weeks…

An eight part online festival, presenting long-form video interviews and entirely original poetry films. Unable, finally, to take place in the flesh this year, the festival will present poets from Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, Lithuania and more, leaning in to what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest.  / The full program is available to view www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 and the 'events' will be released via this newsletter and online every few days November 23rd to December 10th. To begin, we are very happy to present three new long-form video-interviews with Swiss poets to kick off EPF Digital 2020. More on the work of Laura Accerboni, Rolf Hermann and Linn Molineaux is available at www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss with videos below and on YouTube. These interviews are supported by Pro Helvetia and are part of the Maintenant series at 3am magazine.

A note on : Beijing October Literary Festival online

I had such a lovely time being part of The Beijing October Literary Festival online recently. I had the pleasure to visit and read in Beijing in 2016 and made friends there who remain correspondees to this day and so this was, for me, a reconnection. The online festival has two themes - the city and tradition with modernity. I gave a talk on London, on its relationship to my writing, reflecting on how physical space, proximity, alters the reality of the writer, and how the modern city demands a modern literature, that looks forward, future facing, rather than looks to history for writing. History is for history. It seems to go down well, which was gratifying, but for me, the other speakers were exceptional and this was arguably the best online event I’ve done. It was especially cool to watch the Chinese poets and writers talk about Beijing and the modern Chinese megacity. It was a frank and playful conversation at times.